All Hail Hugh Freeze

University of Mississippi football coach Hugh Freeze has earned the crux of what's already being hailed — before a game — as one of the storied university's best recruiting classes ever, even before all their targets have signed. The young man's name is Robert Nkemdiche. He's the unequivocal top recruit in the nation, a defensive end acclaimed for possessing the feet of a running back. And he is another piece in Hugh Freeze's endeavor to bring Ole Miss away from its very troubled history, both recent and from decades ago, both inside and outside the sidelines. And the new coach might just be able to.

Hugh Freeze has long been beloved. Before ascending to the college level, Freeze won two Tennessee high school football state titles, and then five with his girls basketball team. But most famously, during his tenure he advocated on behalf of homeless colossus — and as of a few days ago, Super Bowl champion offensive tackle — Michael Oher to get him into Freeze's school. But as Michael Lewis wrote in an adaptation of The Blind Side for the Times, "This wasn't something you did for the Briarcrest [High School] football team, Freeze said; this was a thing you did because it was right! Briarcrest was this kid's last chance!" (In the film, Freeze was renamed Burt Cotton.)

After shaping Oher into a football player, Freeze got him into Ole Miss, where he became an All-American. The recruitment was somewhat scandalous, since 20 days later Freeze got a job as an assistant athletic director at Ole Miss. But the NCAA found no violations in the college's recruitment of Oher (they did, however, find him guilty of contacting other recruits from the town before starting at Ole Miss). Freeze eventually became the program's recruiting coordinator, and in his first earned the school's highest recruiting class ever, at the time (ranked 13th).

In the November of 2007, Freeze had a stint as an interim head coach for Ole Miss. He then hopped to Lambuth University for a couple years (including an undefeated regular season), then to Arkansas State, and then his trajectory landed back at Ole Miss. "This is home," he said in his introductory press conference.

Freeze was born in the university's city, Oxford, seven years after the campus riot over a black man's attendance that became of the apex of its racist past. That night, as Wright Thompson wrote in his recent, beautiful chronicling of the events and the school's history, "The Civil War [had] begun anew, and the North [was] losing." The marshall's desperate efforts to stop the mob included shepherding a beloved, menacing linebacker from the team to beg that the rioters stop so a doctor can help a dying man. He didn't succeed. People died. Many were injured, too. And it occurred in 1962, after a few decades of football dominance, and during a season in which they claim they won the national championship. The university still struggles with tolerance today. And long before, their struggles flooded onto the football field. The Rebels have seen decades of middling — if not floundering — underachievement that followed.

All this Hugh Freeze cannot erase. But he can change it.

In his first season, this year, Ole Miss finished with seven wins, including a bowl win over Pitt. But the highlight might've been their thrashing of Mississippi state in an 85-year-old rivalry game. Before the players took the field, Freeze went into full preacher mode: "Here's the difference: Some schools in rivalry games choose to play it out of hatred for the other school. That's not who we are. Here's why we'll win the game tonight: Because you're going to play for love for one another, not hatred for somebody else."

Freeze faced the common struggle of new college football coaches, and especially ones who have roots dug into recruiting: Playing mostly with another man's roster, which hadn't won an SEC game since October, 2010. But he loved his boys nonetheless. And they respected him in return. It's the reason that Freeze actually has a shot of reinventing a university with so much to overcome. "You don't want to disappoint a man like that," Denzel Nkemdiche, an All-SEC linebacker who may have left Mississippi for a better managed program if it hadn't been for Freeze's arrival, and who is also the brother of Robert, told SBNation. "A man who you know cares for you as a person. You want to make that guy happy. He came into the wilderness and said he was going to steer us out."

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